Rosberg leads from start to finish

Takes win ahead of Mercedes teammate Hamilton at Monaco

MONACO – Nico Rosberg won the Monaco Grand Prix from the pole position on Sunday to take the overall championship lead from his teammate Lewis Hamilton, who came second to give Mercedes a fifth straight 1-2 finish.

The German driver clinched his second victory of the season and fifth of his career, making a strong start and holding off Hamilton to repeat his maiden GP win from the pole here in Monaco last year.

Rosberg finished 9.2 seconds ahead of Hamilton, who was just 0.4 faster than Daniel Ricciardo. The Red Bull driver was unable to get past Hamilton on a track that is the most difficult to overtake on in Formula One.

Four-time defending champion Sebastian Vettel’s frustrating season with Red Bull continued as he abandoned early with a power-unit failure.

Mercedes has also taken every pole position so far this season: four for Hamilton and two for Rosberg, who won the season’s opening race in Australia.

Hamilton spent the final four laps blocking Ricciardo. It was a second straight third-place finish for the impressive Ricciardo, who is now ahead of Vettel, his more illustrious teammate.

Hamilton did pressure Rosberg at times, even trimming his lead back to 0.8 seconds and would certainly have attacked more on another track. But Monaco’s 78-lap circuit – which has the slowest average speed on the F1 calendar – meant Rosberg’s position was relatively safe throughout, unless Hamilton tried a risky move that could have made him crash.

Overtaking is so tough that 10 of the past 11 winners have done so from pole, the exception being Hamilton in 2008, the year he won the title.

Qualifying first for the race came amid controversial circumstances for Rosberg, who was cleared by stewards of any wrongdoing after making a late error that led to a yellow flag and curtailed Hamilton’s chances of beating his time with less than a minute left in Saturday’s session.

It was an incident that fueled the growing rivalry between the two runaway leaders in the overall standings.